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UAC version 2.1 offers access control, visibility, and monitoring of applications and users to address regulatory compliance and mitigate risk and exposure to an ever-evolving landscape of threats. According to Juniper Director of Product Management Karthik Krishnan, version 2.1 is in line with Juniper's broader strategy to give enterprises advanced, coordinated visibility and control of applications and users across the enterprise.

UAC 2.1 includes the following features:

Coordinated threat control, which uses Juniper's Intrusion Detection and Prevention (IDP) platforms for Layers 2 through 7 visibility into application traffic. This allows IT to isolate a threat at the user or device level and employ a specific, configurable policy action against that user or device.

According to Krishnan, companies now consider networks and network access as critical to success and are recognising that access control, visibility, and monitoring of applications and users are essential to mitigate exposure to internal and external threats. Network access control (NAC), he said, is at an evolutionary stage, maturing from simple pre-admission controls, guest-user access and endpoint policy assessment. Instead, NAC is now wrapping in post-admission policies and controls, role-based application access, and network and application visibility and monitoring. In UAC 2.1, Juniper has added the ability to implement security policy enforcement broader and deeper into a network's core and outward to the edge, mitigating many of the risks associated with exposing corporate assets.

Andrew Braunberg, senior analyst at research firm Current Analysis, said Juniper's UAC updates will continue to make Juniper a worthy competitor in the network access control market. He added, however, that many of the enhanced features aren't entirely new but instead a spin on already existing functionality.

"With NAC, it's about letting users leverage their existing security investments," he said, adding that he wonders if UAC 2.1's IDP tie-in will be opened up to third-party intrusion detection and prevention tools.

Overall, Braunberg said, Juniper has been able to round out both the pre- and post-connect capabilities of UAC, tasks, that, he added, users and market research ranks rather high among NAC tools. Additionally, adding in identity- and role-based awareness for auditing and compliance furthers NAC's capabilities. And while he said the updates, such as a Vista client and the ability to discover unmanageable devices agentlessly, are not a "huge new deal," he noted that they represent progress.

"This will help [Juniper] stay competitive," he said.

Competition in the NAC market, which is dominated by Cisco's framework and appliance, has recently reached a plateau, since few new functions are being created. Braunberg said many vendors are enhancing their NAC offerings in order to stay on par, but no real new functionality has arisen since the market reached a level of maturity.

"There's not really going to be anything new under the sun in the NAC market over the next few years," Braunberg said, citing something he read recently. "Most of it is already available. Vendors will continue fortifying their NAC solutions."